Founded in 1952, the Shanghai Museum is a large-scale museum of ancient Chinese art. Later the new museum was chosen to build in People’s Square, the center of Shanghai, and opened to the public on October 12, 1996.

The total area of the Shanghai Museum is 39,200 square meters, and the height of the building is 29.5 meters. The design style of the round dome and square base reflects the Ancient Chinese’ simple understanding of the universe (“round sky, square earth”), and the whole museum has five levels above ground and two below and is divided into 11 special halls and 3 temporary exhibition halls. It houses a collection of 120,000 precious cultural relics, featuring particular bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy, and paintings. The most precious two collections are an ancient cooking vessel with a dragon pattern of the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC) (龙纹扁足鼎 Longwen Bianzu Ding ‘Dragon-Pattern Flat-Foot Tripot’) and an excessively free cursive style calligraphy work of The Red Cliff Ode (草书前后赤壁赋).

Considered to be one of Chinese first world-class modern museums, the Shanghai Museum is well known at home and abroad for its richness and exquisite quality of the collection.